set my sights too high

Medusa is strangely glad to hear that Danny is doing okay. She didn’t think about him much, when he was Reaper. When he was a mostly absent shell of a person, a damaged thing, a blunt force object. She had been sad for him, quietly, but she hadn’t put too much time into worrying about him. Its different now, with Danny coming out into the light. He’s just a boy, it feels like. His body is older than hers is, but she still has the urge to take him under her wing and make sure he’s safe. His body has been used to kill and spy and do a thousand things, but there’s something soft and so innocent behind his eyes. He isn’t like the rest of them, and he didn’t pick this life for himself. He’s someone who needs a gentler hand, she thinks. And someone who needs to be protected. 

Catalyst seems pretty committed to protecting him, caring for him. That much had been true even when he was Reaper, when one of them knew that there was a real person lingering underneath the surface that might come out at any moment. 

She just hopes that he’s taking care of Catalyst in turn. And that Catalyst is taking care of herself. There’s been a lot of weight put on her shoulders lately. Because everyone trusts her, because she’s probably the best of them all. Because shes kind of wonderful in nearly ever way, beloved by those around her.

Catalyst is a little lost, she says. And Medusa is glad that she admits it, instead of giving a mostly true but half hearted platitude about being fine. And Medusa can’t help but smile, just a little bit, at the words that leave her mouth. Because they sound like the words of someone whose finally realising how much they’re worth, how much they can do, and how strange it is to not know what to do next. 

“No, I get it.” She nods her head. “Living one day at a time is fine, it’s nice sometimes. But maybe you need more than that.” More than the daily grind, more than living from one mission to the next. She purses her lips, quietly in thought for a moment. “You know, you were good. Really good, with that purpose of yours. It was nice, to see everyone rally behind you.” 

“It sounds to me like you’re finally realising that you’re a better leader than half of the clowns who tell us what to do every day.” And its a traiterous thought, but Medusa has never thought much of Ms White since she woke up here –– she doesn’t have a reason, or a vendetta. She just thinks the woman is weak, and it’s a little pathetic that no one has gotten rid of her yet. If she had any interest in leading, she would have done it herself. But Catalyst… Catalyst was soemone they could all work with, in one way or another. She had proven that even the people who didn’t like her would work with her, when it came down to it. “God, I hope that didn’t make me sound like Dr. Judgement and his band of merry incompetents.” 

It’s sort of funny. When Dulce had complimented her work on the mission, she’d sort of written it off, sort of been reluctant to really take in the words. Because he’d always thought her incapable, reckless, untrustworthy, and despite his best intentions, there had been such a note of surprise to the way he’d complimented her—an unspoken I never thought you’d be capable of basic competence, let alone this to it—that she hadn’t really let the words sink in. But when Medusa says it, when Medusa tells her she was good, it feels different. 

Because Medusa’s right. She was good. It hadn’t gone flawlessly, it probably never could have, but it had gone far better than any of them had hoped. They’d saved almost all of the Guardians. They’d brought Velocity and Overload and Doppelgänger and Gabe and Nightingale back to safety. They’d put a couple of the zombies back to rest, back where they belonged. And, aside from a few minor injuries and a little bit of general emotional trauma, they’d all made it back out of the Tower in one piece. 

And she can’t take all the credit for that. Every single one of them pulled their weight, in their, gave it their all. But she can probably take a little bit of the credit. Probably deserves that, with the weeks of endless planning, getting as many villains on board as possible, even the ones who, like Dulce, hated her guts. 

     “I... never thought about it like that,” she replies, her voice a little dazed, a little dreamy with the realization. A leader. She’d never considered herself much of a leader before, except if you counted convincing all of her friends to be a part of her and Dark Wing’s prank war. She’d never really had aspirations towards leadership. Even as a kid, she’d been generally sort of unambitious. “I mean, I never thought of myself that way. Huh.” 

She lets her gaze drift back to the snakes, happily lounging in the sun lamp in their tank, back at rest after the minor disturbance of someone new entering into their space. Not a care in the world. She’d thought, when she first came here, how nice it was to not have to care anymore. To just be. To take things a step at a time, no goals, no plans, no hopes. It had served her well, for ten years. It had let her figure out who she wanted to be, one day at a time. But she’d found so much to care about, since then. And watching the Collective fall apart has been weighing on her, the past year—even longer, if she counts Banshee, which she has to now. Watching people leave, and run away, because of White’s actions, even if she didn’t know it at the time.

It feels treasonous to think it, but Medusa might have a point. And Lazarus had said something similar, about their leadership being out of touch with what they all actually deal with. 

Shit like this is a relief after so much serious business lately, so many life or death situations they’re all having to face. The simplicity of just smashing shit to pieces and blowing shit up is exactly what they need, no surprise. It’s especially needed as they do finally get back to the subject of White, and what her reaction to all of this has been. For their part, Lazarus hasn’t had to face her down luckily, and they don’t think that she could really stand to tell them off for their part in things, given that their power is the reason they were able to get so many of the zombies back in their graves where they belong, and give those poor families some peace. They’d tell her as much if they did have to talk to her, but so far, bigger fish to fry, which they don’t mind one bit, planning to do even more she probably won’t be happy with, after all, in their search for Tartarus. 

They can imagine it all too well, though, even if their own interactions with White have been few and far between. She’s got that sort of vibe, a disappointed school principal, a way of making you feel shitty without even having to say it all outright. And it’s clear that she’s cold as fuck, kind of in a scary way, considering what it is she was willing to do to the people who were rallying the vote against her all to get them off of her back and to make them seem like enemies of the Collective. They’ve got a feeling whatever she does next isn’t gonna be pretty for any of them. 

And Catalyst’s point is true; it’s White’s fault that it got this far in the first place, because of how she decided to handle things. Her words are punctuated with the toss of a can, giving way to an impressive expansion then explosion that has them letting out a low whistle, even as they nod. “Yeah, she fucked up big time in the first place to get us all to this point. I think it’s, like, that old school mentality. Guess she didn’t stop and think that supervillains aren’t all about backstabbing and blame shifting nowadays,” Lazarus reasons, taking another swig of the booze. 

It might be simplifying it a little, but they think that’s probably the big overarching issue, if anyone thought about it deeper. Medusa’s said as much before, after all, just how different things were in her time, how much more vicious things were. Kind of feels like White’s been operating under that mindset, despite being in an age where even supervillains are more human. Not to say they agree with how things have shaken out with the rouge villains, but they feel the same as Catalyst about it now.

“t’s almost like having two old timers at the head of everything, with no say from the people who do the real work is a bad idea. Bad execution, bad reasoning, but yeah, I feel you, they might’ve been onto something with that call for change.”

.

She drops down onto the couch beside them as she finished talking, grabbing the vodka bottle from them and taking a swig, gesturing that it’s their turn to break shit if they want to, because she’s still pretty worked up, but venting out all the shit she’s been feeling about White has kind of taken it all out of her for a second. But it feels good to hear Lazarus agree with her, to hear someone else confirm the annoyance she’d been feeling. All of this, on top of what Banshee had told her, it’s been eating away at her a little, a constant annoyance at the back of her mind that she can’t really do anything about.

Because, as stupid as what White had done by leaking the identities of the rogue villains had been, it had gotten the job done: it had sent a message to anyone else who might have any dissatisfaction with White that crossing her had major consequences, that there were no lengths she wouldn’t go to to keep her own place at the top of the food chain. And Catalyst doesn’t have anything else, besides the Collective, no life outside of it. Banshee had at least had somewhere else to turn. Catalyst doesn’t even know people outside of the Manor, really, certainly doesn’t have anyone she could run to. 

And she has too much, here, to risk losing any of it. To lose Danny, or Dark Wing, or any of it... she can’t imagine it. She has no idea what she’d do. 

      “It’s too bad there isn’t anything we can do about it,” she sighs, resigned, slumping back ag against the couch and taking another swig of vodka. “I mean, not that we’d be in a place to do anything even if we could, given we still have no idea what the fuck Judgement’s next steps are, or what he wanted with Dmitri, or where he and the rest of the zombies are now. We’ve lost our inside sources, so we’re kind of shit out of luck now, anyway.”

Medusa let’s a soft smile break out across her face. It’s just a gentle thing, slow and certain and right on the border of indulgent. She can see what Catalyst is describing, can see the ways that a room like that would brighten up her own world. Another safe haven for the things that needed it. It would be nice to build something here, to make a mark. It was what Midas would have done, what he had done when Demeter clearly needed a space for herself. He saw the need and he built a Greenhouse, with the prettiest glass that money could buy and gold accents that would catch the light and make her smile. The very idea of leaving a mark on this place is like a hook in the heart. She doesn’t think the idea will ever leave her alone, now. 

“Well now we have to make it happen.” And doing it with Catalyst would be like cementing a friendship. Building a bond up stronger and stronger, until they could claim each other fully. Medusa was sure that one of these days, she would start thinking of Catalyst as her friend just as much as she was Dark Wings. It would be nice, she thought, to feel that kind of ownership over a connection again, to add Catalyst to the list of people she trusted most in the world. 

She watches Catalyst mull over her suggestion, take it all in stride. Medusa thinks that she and Danny are probably good for each other. They seem to click together in ways that Medusa can’t quite understand. Even before he was Danny. Medusa always took a bit longer to fit into place with people. Instant connections were hard for her. She needed time, to build them. The closest thing she had ever come to instantly belonging with someone was her brother. Her Jim. He was probably her soulmate.

“He seems like the kind who would go all soft and mushy over a rescue.” She muses, voice soft as she considers it. She can see it working, see it helping him. “Just remember to thank me when you get to stand around and watch fuzzy adorable animals crawl all over him.” 

She hesitates for a moment, then, and considers everything they’ve been through over the last few weeks. Danny getting pulled into a mess he never asked for, for a club he never really joined. “How is he doing, anyway? After everything, after the tower?” Her eyes narrow a little, and she reaches out, nudges Catalyst softly with her elbow. “How are you doing?” 

It felt important to ask, finally. Because apparently Catalyst could hold up a skyscraper. She probably felt like she needed to hold up the entire world. But she didn’t have to, at least not alone. 

     “He would definitely get all soft and mushy over a rescue,” she confirms with a laugh, and she can picture it, his big puppy dog eyes, his sincere little smile. And that decides it, really: she’ll suggest it tomorrow, maybe, see if he wants to. Maybe not immediately—as easy as it seems to have been for Medusa to make space for her snakes, a dog seems like it might require a little more legwork to find space for in the Manor, especially since Danny’s still sharing a room with Lazarus. But it might be nice, to have something to look forward to in the future, the promise of something nice.

She thinks he could use more nice things. She’d like him to have all the nice things in the world, really, surround himself with the kind of softness he’d been denied for so many years by the programming jammed into his head.

     “He’s... doing okay, I think,” she says. They’ve seen a lot of one another, but they’ve also been on their own more and more. He’s been at Dulce’s quite a lot, spending his time with Gabe, trying to make a breakthrough and get his brother back, and while sometimes she goes with him to keep him company, most of the time she figures it’s better for him to have his space, to go alone and let it be just him and Gabe, especially when he knows that he can always ask for her to be there if he needs.

It’s Medusa’s second question that catches her off guard. And Medusa isn’t the first person to ask her how she’s holding up, not at all. But something about the conversation they’ve shared makes her feel like she ought to answer this question with something other than oh I’m fine, finally recovering. Because she thinks Medusa will understand the feeling she’s been having trouble putting into words. 

     “I gotta admit, I feel a little lost,” she says after a moment, shrugging as she says it. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, not having all of that shit on my shoulders, getting a break, it’s nice. But, you know, I had one thing driving me for weeks, something to do, something to focus on. And now it’s over and we’re just as in the dark as we were before, if not more, and I’m... kind of at a loss.”

Catalyst seems as happy as Danny feels, and it sets his heart on fire. There’s a joy in her voice, mixed in with the teasing, the kind of tone that Danny wants to hear for the rest of his life. He’s so sure of all of this, so sure of himself and his own desires here.  It’s Catalyst. She’s what he wants. And with every passing moment he’s more confident in that instinct, because it feels so right. Her eyes meeting his, the sound of her voice, her hand on his chest.

“I think those are the rules, yeah.” He says, and he even sounds like he’s smiling. He can hear the half-alien happiness, the swell of confidence. Because she wants him too. He didn’t mess it all up, by kissing her, by asking for what he wanted. He knows it wouldn’t have ruined them if she didn’t want it, but it means everything that it does. He hardly has the words out before Catalyst is kissing him again, her lips pressing back against his own, the gentle push and pull of it.

She puts more into this kiss, she seems more sure, and there’s more force behind it. It makes something wriggle in his stomach, a happy and contented feeling growing in his chest. Because kissing might be the nicest thing in the world, the best thing you could ever spend your time doing. He lets her push up against him, lets her settle them back on the bed, her weight shifting more on top of him. He thinks, offhandedly, that if this was someone else he might feel a little bit trapped. But there’s no pressure here, and even before Catalyst says the words herself, he knows that she would back off the second that he asked, the second he showed the slightest bit of uncertainty. It makes it easier to fall into it, to let her kiss him, to let her touch him.

He shakes his head, when she pulls back just that little bit to tell him. “I don’t want you to stop.” He says, because it’s the truth. Danny is more than enthusiastic when they start again. He wonders if he should feel insecure about how long it’s been since he kissed someone like this, but he doesn’t seem to be fucking it up. He follows her lead, for the most part, happy and dedicated to making her feel as good as he does right now. He reaches up to tangle his fingers in her hair, to pull her just a little bit closer. His metal hand finds her hip and touches a stray slip of bare skin on her side. And he pulls it away just as fast, settles it on her back, where her skin is covered by the cloth of her shirt. He knows it’s usually cold, especially compared to how warm Catalyst usually feels when he touches her, and he doesn’t want to make her uncomfortable. “Sorry,” He says, a little breathless, when he takes a second to break away from the kiss. 

He rests his forehead against hers, so close it makes him ache. “Was it cold?”

It feels like he’s reading her mind, somehow, as he slips his hand into her hair and tangles his fingers there, drawing a sharp, pleased little noise out of her against his mouth. And then his other hand finds her hip and she can’t help but shiver, at the feeling of it, not so much because his metal fingertips are cold to the touch but more because it’s Danny, and he’s touching her, and her skin feels a little bit like it’s on fire all over. She feels the loss of contact acutely, when he immediately pulls his hand away, and the feeling is slightly repaired when she feels the pressure of his hand find somewhere to settle nearby, on her back, over the fabric of her sweatshirt, nice, and good, but not as good as it was.

     “No,” she answers, kissing the corner of his mouth again, and then realizing what he actually asks, amends the answer: “I mean, yeah. Yeah, it was cold. But it’s okay, it was nice. You can— you don’t have to apologize.”

She lets out a soft, nervous laugh as she rests her forehead against his, too, and her chest feels a little bit like it might explode, with some overwhelming mix of fondness and affection and desire and happiness and longing. Danny, his gorgeous, curly hair already messy from her pillows, his soft pajamas, the look on his face, not quite overwhelmed but so full of feeling as he looks up at her.

     “You can touch me, Danny,” she says. “I want you to.” 

Jet can’t help the flush of happiness he feels, here with Catalyst. It’s the feeling that always comes along with her companionship. Like warmth, like safety, like one of the few people he’s pretty sure will never walk away from him. One of the few people who will never really let him walk away either. He’s almost certain that Catalyst would come find him, if he ditched her, even if it was only to yell at him and kick his ass. But he would never do that to her, because she would probably cry, and then he would cry, and then he’d have to go jump off a building to put them both out of their misery. 

He wiggles back in the booth a little, mimics her by throwing his own legs up on the leather beside her body, makes himself comfortable there. A smile spreads across his face, because he likes the idea of being someones hero, of being looked up to by some of the kids out there, being an inspiration for them. It makes him feel like he actually did something right in his life, like he didn’t fuck it all up completely. Jet lets a small laugh escape his chest. “Damn, don’t let the scary statue lady hear you call her old. I said she had a kind of retro charm once, and I swear she almost turned me to stone.” He shrugs a shoulder, and nods his head in a teasing agreemnt. “But you do have a point I’ll concede that much to you.” 

He shifts, and nods his head. Catalyst is one of the people who nearly always takes his suggestions, who trusts him to come up with a plan. A grin, a soft laugh. “Maybe we should let Mayhem come up with a term for it.” A joke, with a teasing wrinkle of his nose. He shoves his second-last bite of pie into his mouth, before clanking his own fork against hers on the table. “Cheers, to making plans, and all that bullshit. And to teenage supervillians with superiority issues.” 

He thinks it will work, however the plan settles. Replica, at the very least, will know that there are options out there for her. If she doesn’t want to join the team, that’s her choice. But if she knows some of them, and things get bad for her, she’ll know people that she can ask for help. He softens a little bit, at the thought of it, and as he looks at Catalyst. “Thank’s for bringing me in on this. This is exactly the kind of job I need right now, you know?” 

     “Cheers,” she responds with a grin. 

And she really does feel better about the whole thing already. It’s as much a distraction for her as it is for Jet, both of them with a hundred other things to think about, to worry about. Her with White on her ass after the whole Tower thing, Jet taking care of his new injured boyfriend half the time. It’s nice to have something low stakes to deal with that, at the same time, isn’t totally trivial. 

     “Duh,” she answers. “Wouldn’t dream of doing it without you. Where would the fun in that be?”

And then, because they haven’t actually talked about the whole taking care of his injured boyfriend thing, or even the boyfriend thing since he admitted briefly to her that he was staying with Mind Master and that, somehow, against all odds, it sounded like the Guardian was maybe the most half-decent boyfriend Jet had ever managed to snag, nor have they talked about the surprising, unexpected developments in Cat’s love life over the past week or two, she lets herself sit back and grin at him. 

     “I figured no matter how good a boyfriend your little Guardian is, you probably needed something to do with your time other than playing nurse. You’ve never been good at sitting still. How’s all of that going, anyway? How’s your new sister in law taking it?”

They flop down on the couch, letting the bat rest across their lap, thoroughly ready for the show they know she’ll be able to provide with her powers. Picking up the bottle of booze, they open it again, and take a long drink, more than ready for the pleasant warmth of a buzz to set it. They haven’t really had time for their usual fuckery lately. Surprisingly enough, between getting back to the grand hunt at hand to stop even more shit from going down, going over their own new history, and being with Cas, their evening spent getting thoroughly fucked up have dwindled. It’s definitely for the best, yeah, but that doesn’t mean they don’t wanna let off steam every now and then still, especially right now.

That earns her a scoff of laughter. “Yeah, well, I can’t offer a Bahamas vacation, but once this shit is all over, I talked to Jet and Dark Wing about going down to New Orleans to dig up my dirty past. I was thinking we could make a grand vacation of it, you all can get shitfaced, while I figure out who I am,” they laugh, but they are serious about it. The idea of going down there with other people makes it feel less daunting to face the past, and they know they’d all have a hell of a good time. The part about White, though, they figure they’ll come back to once Catalyst has had at least one turn at letting off a little steam of her own.

It’s honestly just as fun watching Catalyst blow shit up with her mind as it is to actually break the shit themself. She looks at the glass bottle she’s chosen for a second, before finally throwing it out towards the field, where it shatters into a bunch of shards in the air. There are a lot of cool and terrifying powers in the Collective, but they’ve gotta admit that Catalyst’s got a power they’ve love to try out themself, if they could. Blowing shit up, being able to mess with things on a molecular level or whatever sciencey bullshit it technically is, is a hell of a lot better in their humble opinion than their life force shit. At least she doesn’t have to hurt herself to help anyone out, unlike them. 

“Now that’s how it’s fuckin’ done,” they call, giving her a round of applause, even though they know it’s probably mostly effortless on her part, using her powers to shatter something like that. “What about White, though, how pissed off is she about it?”

.

She spins around, giving a dramatic little flair of a bow in their direction and beaming at their applause. Easy as it is, to break a bunch of glass, it’s fun to get to feel like she’s showing off. And it’s funny, how much more glamorous it looks than the actually hard stuff—like holding up an entire collapsing skyscraper, which had been probably the least glamorous thing she’d ever done with her powers, and yet had left her wiped out for almost a week. She’s been thinking, ever since her conversation with Epoch, about how much of what RESCUE did was the kind of shit she used to want to do—and about how after the Tower, she’s pretty sure she’s not cut out for that stuff in the long run. How much easier it is to break stuff.

     “Ugh,” she replies, picking up another piece of garbage — an old soda can, this time, the aluminum pliable under her fingers. She’s willing to bet she can make it pop like a balloon if she tries hard enough. “She didn’t say she’s pissed off, directly, but you know how she gets. All cold and disappointed. Like a fucking school principal in a bad high school TV show. And I maybe kind of almost shouted at her, which I think probably didn’t help anything.” 

She tosses the soda can, along a similar trajectory to the glass bottle she’d just thrown, watching as it hits the very top of its parabolic arc in the air and then, with an explosive noise, shreds apart into a half dozen strips of thin metal.

     “As if this whole thing wasn’t her fault in the first place. Like... yeah, okay, you want to be mad at me for cleaning up the mess you made just because you wanted it cleaned up a different way? Maybe if you’d picked up the fucking mop in the first place, none of us would be having this problem.”

In all honesty, she’d been too rattled by what Banshee had told her to even feel badly about disappointing White the way she might have even a week, but definitely a few months, before. She used to hold a lot of stake in what White thought of her, because she’d been a dumb kid who had joined the Collective at an impressionable age where having older role models approve of her actions had held any stake for her. 

The urge to reach out and console Cat is a tempting one, as they watch her struggle through having to recalibrate her own mindset on White. They nearly reach out a hand to her, but instead they keep it tucked against their side, where their arms were still crossed against it. Too much time and too much shit had passed between them now, they still had that bitterness in them, deep down, that everyone seemed to so quickly take White’s word instead of even try to reach out to them. It was no use in wallowing in that bitterness, they know, but its enough that they feel the need to still keep themself at arm’s length from the others. 

“I wouldn’t expect you to,” they add with a weak smile, grateful at least that the truth had finally been aired out after all this time. They’re curious to see just what the others will do now, now that their blinders to White and her true nature had been removed. They’re almost sad they won’t have a front row seat to it all, once it does hit the fan, but they’ll settle for hearing it second hand from whatever source eventually gets to them first. 

Looking back over to Dori, they nod their head, letting her know they were just about done now. There was really no telling what the future would now hold for them all now, but they were content in knowing they at least had somewhere to land now after it’s all boiled over. 

“Take care of yourself, yeah?” They look to her again, “and take care of the murder robot/maybe boyfriend.” They shoot her a weak smile before turning away from her, giving her arm a light punch for good measure before they do. 

They hang back quietly as Cat processes the news they’d just delivered her, and goes through the motions that they once went through themself. They’d long accepted what had happened, they had to in order to actually move on with their life and not stew forever in the anger they’d felt when White forced them out of the manor. In the years since their departure from the Collective, they have managed to pick up the shattered pieces of the life they once had, and made it into something new, something that was theirs now. 

When Cat turns back to look at them finally, they shoot her a flattened smile, sorry that they had to burst the bubble for her, but knowing it had to be done- especially considering everything else that had been going on lately. 

“She said it was in the best interest of the Collective, which I would imagine is what she’ll say if you or anyone else confronts her about what’s happened tonight, and what led up to it.” And perhaps White was right to a certain extent, but they can’t agree with just how she’d done all of this, especially when it has clearly led them all to the shitstorm they just went through. 

“What happened tonight… your role in this,” they let out a small sigh, uncertain just how to best warn her for what may come. “I doubt she’ll kick you out for this, not with so many others tied to it. At the end of the day she’s a politician, and she’ll try to twist this in whatever way she can to make herself still look favorable in the end.” 

.

Catalyst has never been one for politics. She understands the point of it all, she does, but it’s never been how she liked to operate. She’s never been able to help being blunt, being honest, being loud and obvious with her opinions: everyone knows exactly what she thinks of them, good or bad. And she likes it that way. She thinks it must be exhausting, to hide your feelings, to manipulate people, to try to say things in ways that will get you what you want without just saying what you want. 

It’s why she’d jumped right into this with no reasoning except that it was the right thing to do, that V had asked her to, that Jet and Dark Wing had believed in her. That she couldn’t stand by and watch this happen without doing something about it. That wasn’t politics, it was just right. And she thinks Banshee’s right, probably, that White won’t kick her out, or punish her outright for all of this, but find a way to use it to her advantage instead. 

But it only adds to the sting of understanding just how much of a politician White has been this entire time. A betrayal that Catalyst feels stupid for not having understood sooner, feels naive for even feeling as something as personal as a betrayal. 

Maybe V had been right. V, and Doppelganger, and Overload, and the others... it’s hard to think that, when she’s still suffering the after effects of trying to stop their stupid fucking plot to kill all of the Guardians using an army of zombie villains, but it’s tempting. To say fuck it altogether, despite it all.

     “I’m sure she’ll find a way to be very persuasive about that,” Catalyst replies, bitterly, and she’s sorry that Banshee has to be the one on the receiving end of her frustration here, when they’d just been the bearer of bad news they’d been bearing for a long, long time before all of this. And god, there’s that too, on top of it, the feeling of guilt in her chest, knowing that Banshee had been kicked out, had been all but alone, and all of them had turned their backs on them.

The half mechanical man with the pained eyes that she had glimpsed, on security footage, and in the aftermath had a name. Danny. It was a remarkably normal one. The kind of name that any man might have, if you ran into him on the street. But he wasn’t normal. He was a victim, at the end of the day, of something too horrible to name. Brainwashing, being reduced to a machine that was built to carry out orders for whoever got their hands on him. It makes Lena distinctly uncomfortable. And even more unsettled than she would be just by the fact itself, because she knew that face. She never forgot a Guardian. 

And The Creator was someone hard to forget. A genius. With a striking personality. And a face, just like Danny. 

“I think so. It was –– He looks like Manuel Castillo. The Creator. He was a Guardian, during the 1950s.” She lets out a huff of a breath, and then shifts, pushes herself up and walks over towards her desk to type on her computer and pull up a picture of the Guardians line up from that era, zooming in so that his face is clear as day. She pushes the screen around so that Catalyst can take a look at it, arching her eyebrow in question. She wonders if she’s right, for a second, but her memory has always been good. It’s like every moment is frozen in time, hers to access when she needs to reach back and see something. She remembers Manuel. 

“His power was Super Intelligence.” She explains, as she waits for Catalyst to examine the picture in front of them. “He designed another member of the team, Mr. Mechanical. The worlds first ever AI superhero. It was pretty impressive. I never actually worked with them much, I’d moved on by that point, was getting RESCUE up on it’s feet. But I never forget a robot obsessed weirdo’s face. And believe me, he was weird.”

Weird enough to bring someone like Danny into existence? She wasn’t sure. She didn’t even know how he would start. But if it was possible, Manuel could do it. He always had been obsessed with himself. And he’d always been obsessed with code, with AI, with the merging of mechanical and personhood. 

She glances over, to examine the look on Catalyst’s face. “What do you think? Am I crazy, or… do we have identical triplets with a decades long gap between them on our hands?” 

She listens intently to Epoch’s explanation. The first real clue they’ve had, as to where Danny came from, what might have happened to him—one she hopes they can follow backwards and find who he was before all of that, maybe find more of his family, maybe find a way to help Gabe—and she wants to be able to report it all back as accurately as possible, when she gets back home, back to Danny. Another project for them to work on, it sounds like, now that they’re done with this one. 

And she looks at the picture on the screen that Epoch shows her, and she’s right: he does look like Danny. He does, and he doesn’t. The same eyes, same nose, same curly head of hair. The lower half of his face is obscured by a beard, but all that does is make him look like Gabe, too, which still means he looks like Danny. It’s Danny, it’s Gabe, or, a version of them, apparently form the 1950s. Which... identical twins is easy enough to buy, but this... genetics doesn’t work like this. Doesn’t produce identical men, seventy years apart from one another.

     “No, I don’t think you’re crazy,” she says, slowly, unable to take her eyes off of the picture for a long moment. And then, unable to look at it any longer, because the implications are uncomfortable at best. That not only had Danny been a part of some kind of brainwashing experimentation, but also some kind of cloning one? Started by a robot-obsessed Guardian during, what, the Cold War? 

She looks back at Epoch, and she knows the other woman can see right through her, so she doesn’t bother trying to hide the look on her face. A little bit confused, a little bit horrified, a little bit overwhelmed. And more than all of that: determined. To get to the bottom of this, to dig up every scrap of information there is, about what Castillo had started, about where it had led, about what it had to do with Danny, with Gabe. If they’re going to find anything to help, she thinks, this is probably the starting point.

It’s probably not the most responsible thing they’ve ever done, smashing shit to pieces without any sort of protective gear, but it’s definitely not the least responsible thing they’ve ever done, either, and maybe there’s some part of them, that fucked up self-flagellate part left over from their years leading the cult, that won’t be too bothered by a few scratches, or pieces of glass stuck in skin. But they’re not really here to dissect their mountain of trauma right now, anyway, so they let that one lie. This is about breaking shit with Catalyst.

That gives them a laugh, though, hearing that she’s made it clear he can’t tell her about the details of what goes on between them. Probably for the best for her sake, after all, considering they know full well that, Cas being who he is, at least a few people in the manor are bound to end up knowing the intimate details of their relationship, because that is what it is even if they haven’t really had a full sit down DTR or anything. They do still want Catalyst to be able to look at them without throwing up, especially now that she’s decided to let them out of the dog house, so they’re glad Cas hasn’t told her everything.

She throws a bottle their way, and they swing, and hit it, smashing it to pieces easily. “Hm, maybe my sport was baseball,” they mutter, a little interested. Still doesn’t feel exactly right, but their aim with a bat is pretty fucking good. But they think their aggressive aura, even as a joke, probably rules baseball out. “Listen, Mercury is probably in retrograde, or some shit, it’s no wonder you can feel it all the way across the manor. Not my fault the shit I had to deal with in the Tower hit like five separate pieces of my mysterious traumatic backstory.”

It’s teasing, but it’s true, really. They still haven’t full faced what all of that means, what the fuck Mordred could have been trying to tell them about this Maeve person, and what the deal with Clint was. There’s still too much going on to spend a lot of time on their own personal quest, after all, they still got a ghost to talk to first, and a murderer to hunt down.

“Yeah, well, no shit. You deserve to blow off a hell of a lot of steam after everything you did to make that shit happen smoothly. Glad you know I’ve got good taste when it comes to getting that aggression out, too,” they say with a nod, before pointing at her with the bat, and heading back to the couch to sit themself. “You’re up, I’m hogging all the fun.”

.

She arches her eyebrow at their mention of the Tower—she’d gotten a briefing from every pair after she woke up from her extremely long and much-needed nap, but she hadn’t gotten all of the details, there hadn’t been time for that, and so whatever personal traumas Lazarus dredged up in the Manor are a mystery to her, but that’s not what this hang out sesh us for, unless they decide they want to unload all of it once they’re sufficiently drunk, so she doesn’t push it just yet. 

     “I think I deserve a fucking fully funded vacation to the Bahamas, honestly, but White doesn’t seem to think the same,” she replies, shrugging as she pushes herself up and hops down off the back of the couch. 

She doesn’t bother taking the bat from them, seeing as she has a much more exciting way of breaking shit than by pretending she’s playing sports. Instead, she picks up one of the glass bottles in her hand, weighs it for a second, getting a feel for the material, for the molecules that make up the glass, for the weak spots in it.

It’s nice, to stretch her powers in little ways like this. She hasn’t used them for anything, really, since the Tower; the first few days after, she’d been too exhausted to do much of anything, and since then she’s had too much going on here to sign herself up and head out of the Manor again. But like remembering how to jog again after running a marathon, she figures she has to start soon and start small. So she focuses on the glass of the bottle—and glass is not a material she has a ton of experience with, so easy to shatter with normal human force that it’s rarely worth bothering using her powers to break it—and begins to agitate the molecules in it, accelerating their lazy movement until, a moment later, she throws it as hard as she can out towards the empty field, watching as it shatters into a couple hundred shards high above the ground. 

Jet takes a moment to playfully roll his eyes, because of course Catalyst loves that. Miss Mayhem said that Cat was her hero, and apparently Replica felt the same way. And Jet couldn’t blame them, when it came down to it. Catalyst was probably the coolest person that he knew. She was sharp, and smart, and so loyal that it must kill her. She was wonderful. He loved her, with a fierce devotion. If she ever started to hate him it really would break his heart, probably more than losing anyone else. Because she was the one person he could count on to always want him around. Both of them were so afraid of losing people, but it meant that they held on tighter. And when those instincts met, it bred the kind of devotion that was rare in other people. Catalyst should be adored by the entire world, as far as Jet was concerned. She deserved love, praise, and adoration from everyone that she met. 

But as one of her best friends, it was also his job to roll his eyes at her. “Yeah, yeah. You’re the coolest.” He points a finger at her. “I’m never letting you meet Feline though. I need at least one fanboy in my corner. I can’t let him realise that I’m a C-lister at best.” 

He doesn’t really mean it, but he does kind of like that someone loves him, just the idea of him. He loves the idea of the Terrors as a whole, throughout their history, and by default he loves the people who are leading the group now. He would do anything for them, for those kids who were fighting to make their way in the world, fighting to make a name for themselves. He had made it clear, the last time he saw them, that they could always come to him if they needed help. The Collective might not officially be collaborating with the Terrors, but Jetstream could do whatever he wanted, as far as he was concerned. And he would protect them if they needed it. Fight for them if they ask him to. Most of them would be in the collective someday, anyway. He was protecting their futures. And Feline was probably one of the few who really would make that call, who would genuinely ask Jetstream for help if the chance came up.

He grins, then, wide and pleased. Because it feels good, when Catalyst likes his ideas. “She definitely has a better chance of convincing Replica than either of us do, no matter how much she likes you.” He wrinkled his nose in thought, and considered it. “I’ll see if we can set something up. Maybe Mayhem will even be working on something that Replica could help with, if we’re lucky. I’ll feel it all out with her, if you can get Replica to agree to come meet her.”

It feels nice, after Jet had been gone for so many months, disappeared of the face of the fucking planet, and then shown up only as the job of planning an entire ginormous mission was dumped unceremoniously in her lap because hers was the only cell phone number V had memorized, to just sit and talk to him, with nothing more stressful at hand than how to persuade a mostly harmless internet-famous teenager that she doesn’t know everything there is to know about being a super villain yet. It feels so normal, to watch him roll his eyes at her and defend himself from her teasing, so normal to nudge his thigh with the toe of her boot where her feet are propped up on the booth next to him.

     “Oh come on,” she laughs, “I’m sure there are plenty of twinks out there who idolize you. But cool, competent young women need a badass bitch to look up to, and no offense, but you do not fit that niche. And, as much as I love her, Medusa is definitely too old for a bunch of kids who don’t even know who Gerard Way is.” 

And she’s grateful, too, for his genuine suggestion. It makes a ton more sense than anything she would have come up with on her own—her experience as a teenager was way different to his, or to Replica’s, or to the new Miss Mayhem’s, so as much as either one of them might look up to the person she is now, they probably both would have bullied the shit out of her when she was their age. 

“Of course they can’t,” She muses, wrinkling her nose up as she smiles at the girls, as they scent the air around them and seem to thrive in her presence. “I felt much the same way, at the start.” It’s a silly joke, and only a small one. But it feels nice, the lighthearted air around them, how easy it feels to stand here with Catalyst. “They’ll learn not to try and eat them alive someday.” 

She wondered for a moment if Catalyst ever thought of leaving. She could easily get her own place, they all made enough money for it. Somewhere bigger, somewhere with more space to grow. But she looks at Catalyst, and sees something a lot like how Medusa used to be. She thought she was a lifer, once. That she would grow old inside these walls, that her and her family would never leave. Why would they, when they were so cosy there together, safe inside the walls? Catalyst seemed like she was the same, like the Manor was her home. Maybe she would grow up and grow out of it someday, like Medusa had started to, but there was no rush. They could have everything they wanted right here.

“You should get something,” She says, and she sounds… practically enthusiastic about it. She thinks having a pet, a companion who won’t walk away from you, has helped her more than a lot of other things have. “There’s plenty of space in the manor. We could commandeer another room and start a reptile house.” And she smiles, about the idea, considering it.

She considers something else, as well. Because she’s noticed that Catalyst and Reaper have been closer and closer lately, that they’re more wrapped up in each other than ever. She’s seen the endless devotion in Danny’s eyes, when he looks at the woman Medusa is talking to now. She’s seen the fear in his eyes as well, the distress that he tries to hide when he thinks no one else is looking. “A pet might help your Danny, you know? I know what it feels like to end up somewhere you didn’t expect completely out of the blue. He doesn’t strike me as the snake type, but having something soft and fuzzy to take care of might help him settle a bit, when things get hard. Those are a thing now, right? Emotional support animals. My brother, Jim. He could have used one of those. But he had to settle for me instead.”

She hums happily, at the idea Medusa brings up. She’d love to have a lizard, maybe something small to start out with, a pretty little gecko or two—and even better, if they could make space for something bigger in the long run. She’d always wanted a big old monitor lizard she would walk around on a leash like it was a puppy dog. 

     “God, a reptile room is exactly what this ridiculous old Manor needs. Can you picture that? One of the rooms in the back, with the big windows that look out over the garden? A whole bunch of tanks...”

She has to stop herself before she gets carried away with the idea. She doesn’t even know who they’d need to ask for permission to turn one of the old rooms into a cool lizard room, but if it’s White, it’s not happening, given she’s currently almost as high on the fucking shit list as the rogue villains they set out to stop. And thankfully, Medusa moves on to another topic: one that seems way more manageable than converting some old drawing room into a miniature zoo. 

Medusa’s your Danny doesn’t go unnoticed, but Catalyst doesn’t say anything about it, just lets herself feel the quiet little thrill of it, the silent little spark of knowing that someone else has recognized how much she cares about Danny, how much he cares about her. It’s been days, since he first kissed her, and she’s still nowhere near over it, nowhere near over the delighted surprise of it all. 

She pictures it, for a moment: Danny, holding a little tiny kitten, or sitting down with a puppy jumping up on him. Pictures the soft little look on his face, his bright, bright smile. Yeah, she could see Danny with a pet of the more mammalian variety, something cute, and cuddly. Something tactile, and loving, to ground him when he starts to feel overwhelmed. And she knows he still does, still gets overwhelmed sometimes, no matter how much better he’s doing now than he was before, how vast the improvement has been. He’s Danny so often now that she can hardly remember the last time she saw Reaper, and it’s incredible progress, but...

Well, but like Medusa, the world had passed by without his noticing. He’d woken up with no idea where he was, or how he’d gotten there. And she knows it’s still disorienting, and terrifying, that there’s still so much buried beneath the surface that he has to learn to live with. If having the snakes had helped Medusa, then she probably has a point about a pet being something worth bringing up to Danny.

There’s a split second where it feels like the fate of the entire world is hanging in the balance, where the waves could crash and pull him under and drown him. Those thoughts are too intense, maybe, for a kiss. And he would have laughed at anyone who said something like that when he was younger, when he didn’t understand the way this could really feel. But Catalyst is something of world-ending importance, and his stomach twists with anticipation, with the hesitance he feels as his lips ghost against hers. But Danny shouldn’t really have been worried, shouldn’t have been scared, shouldn’t have doubted it. Because he’s seen the look in her eyes, seen the familiar hint of wanting in her. He’s seen how much Catalyst cares about him, has always cared about him.

And she leans in to the kiss, she brings a hand up to his face. It feels… he can’t say its like electricity, but it does give him goosebumps, it does feel like magic. The feeling of her lips against his, the gentle push and pull of the kiss. She’s so steady, and so sure, and it washes away every hint of hesitation he might have been feeling, every small scrap of doubt that he had allowed to linger in his chest. He lets himself fall into it, lets himself put every ounce of feeling he’s ever had for her into this kiss. It’s achingly gentle, so intimate it could make him shiver. He wants to kiss her forever, he thinks. He never wants to pull away, he never wants her to stop touching him. 

He lets out a soft sound, when she pulls away. A tiny huff. But he’s also enjoying the feeling of her forehead, pressed against his. He loves the feeling of closeness, skin on skin, breathing in the same air. This is how close he always wants to be. This is the safest he’s felt since he woke up here in this house. This is the most human he’s felt too, the most in control of his own life. 

“That’s a dangerous offer, Cat.” He says, and he’s breaking out into a smile as well, to mirror the one that Catalyst is giving him. He doesn’t think that he could stop smiling if he tried. His face might be stuck like this forever, dopey and happy and more than half in love with her.

He kisses her again, just a brush of a thing. “You can kiss me whenever you want too. It’s encouraged. It’s a demand, actually. As long as you want to.” 

He looks ecstatic, looks so happy—the happiest she thinks she’s seen him, in all the weeks they’ve been getting to know one another. Happier than he’d looked trying on clothes he picked out himself for the first time. Or going for milkshakes, late one night, when he’d found himself awake and couldn’t sleep. And she gets it. She feels... torn open, somehow, in the best way, like every wall in her heart has come down, like everything she’d ever done to protect herself can fall away, because it’s Danny. He wouldn’t hurt her, he couldn’t, not when he can look at her like that.

     “Oh, a demand?” she repeats, light and a little teasing. She lets her hand fall down to his chest, for a moment, fiddling with the collar of his t-shirt before coming to rest on his shoulder as she looks back up at him. “Well, I really, really want to kiss you, so I guess that means I have to now.”

And she does, does kiss him again, a little more force to it this time, a little more want bleeding through. She wants to be close to him, closer than she can manage with the two of them sitting up on her bed, so she shifts her weight, as she kisses him, pushing him back onto the bed, bracing herself with her arms on either side of him, searching as she does for any resistance, any tension, any sign that she’s moving too fast for him, pushing too far. Any maybe someday she’ll stop worrying that anything she initiates will be too much for him—but for now, she focuses on what he’s said, that he wants to kiss her, and that he knows she’ll never ask him to do anything he doesn’t want to.

     “Tell me if you want me to stop,” she says, a little breathless as she breaks away from the kiss for just a second, and when he doesn’t protest, she turns her attention back to kissing him, back to focusing on the feeling of it and not the voice in her head telling her to slow down, to be careful, not just with him but with herself, too. And it feels good, kissing Danny. For someone who hasn’t done it in... she has no idea how long, but probably as long as it’s been for her, if not longer, he’s pretty good at it, with his soft lips and his warm skin. The perfect mix of enthusiastic and responsive, slowing down when she slows down, pressing close when she presses close. She wants for him to touch her, wants to feel his hands against her bare skin, and she wonders what it would feel like, his hands on her face, or running down her sides, one soft and warm, the other cold and firm and metal. She wonders a dozen different things, her imagination running wild now that she’s stopped making herself decidedly not think about thinks like what it might be like to kiss Danny. 

“And –” He starts, and then breaks off again, with a small sigh. Danny has to take a second to gather himself, to pull himself together, because this might be one of the most important things he’s tried to do since he came back into himself. Catalyst is one of the most important things that’s ever happened to him. And maybe he’s braver now, because he found Gabe, because now something new and big is weighing on him, and Catalyst feels easy. She’s the rock he can lean on, the rock he has been leaning on for months now. She’s steady, and beautiful, and so warm. It feels like laying in a sunbeam, like nothing bad could ever happen when he’s basking in her presence.

He gathers himself, as best he can, and looks into her eyes. He searches for the same feeling, and he thinks he can see it. He’s still worried about saying the wrong thing, about freaking her out and pushing for something that he shouldn’t. But she looks bright, and intense, and like she’s searching for something in him as well. Danny thinks she’s beautiful, Danny thinks she’ll punch him if he makes a wrong move, and he thinks he wouldn’t mind that either. Her voice had been whisper quiet, and Catalyst probably won’t hate him for it. 

“And I want to kiss you. I’ve wanted to kiss you for a long time.” He says, and it sounds honest. He sounds braver than he really feels, but he’s emboldened just by the honesty, by claiming the feeling for himself and owning it. He’s Danny, and she’s Catalyst, and he wants to kiss her. He would want to kiss her even if he had never been Reaper, and he wants to kiss her even more badly because of all of that. Because she knew he was a human long before other people did, because she never even for a second took advantage of his vulnerabilities. He can trust her with every part of himself, and she’s opened up to him in ways that he could never imagine being worthy of. 

She doesn’t seem like she hates the idea, and he takes a leap of faith. He leans in and brushes his lips against hers, just barely, a phantom of a kiss. Enough for her to lean in if she wants it, enough for her to push him away if she wants him to leave. It’s intimate, even in its hesitance, in its softness. It feels like jumping off a ledge, but being safe in the knowledge that no matter what else happens, Catalyst will catch him when he falls. 

She’s relieved to hear it, to hear him say it, to know that she hasn’t pushed too far, hasn’t wanted too much, hasn’t wanted anything he doesn’t want too. She can feel herself relax, at just the words, at the look on his face, so genuine and sincere, so hopeful, so certain. And it doesn’t matter how tired she is, how her bones still ache from the strain of holding up a collapsing skyscraper by sheer force of will alone, because it’s Danny, and he gets to make whatever choices he wants to, now, and he’s choosing this, choosing her. 

     “Oh,” she exhales, when he says it, voice soft and open and full of something that feels almost giddy. And before she can say anything else, before she can do anything about it, he’s leaning forward and he’s kidding her. 

He kisses her like it’s a question, like he’s waiting for the answer. Barely even a kiss, really, but he’s there, he’s staying there: like he’s asking her permission, and like he’s giving her permission. She doesn’t think anyone has ever kissed her as softly as this. And all she’s ever wanted is for Danny to be able to express what he wants, to decide what he wants, to make his own decisions, for himself, on his own terms, and now that he’s decided that this is what he wants, she can’t imagine a world where she would want anything other than to give it to him.

So she leans in, bringing a hand up to his face as she does, as she kisses him back, still slow, but certain where he was hesitant, an answer to his question. And his lips are surprisingly soft, his touch surprisingly gentle. That he’d been able to keep that softness even when someone had tried so hard to strip it out of him and replace with with something cold and clinical feels a little bit like a miracle, like a testament to his strength. She brushes her thumb across his cheek, and there’s so much she wants to do, all of a sudden—to tangle her hands in his pretty, curls hair; to run them down along his broad, strong shoulders; to pull him close and kiss him like her life depends on it a little bit.

She won’t do any of it without asking first, though, not when even this feels like a leap for both of them. And not when this, just this, already makes her heart race in her chest. She feels like she could kiss him like this for hours, lazy and slow. After a moment, though, she shifts away, presses a kiss to the corner of his mouth and leans her forehead against his.

Their curiosity over whether Jet had told any of the others about their conversation in the lounge, is soon resolved once Cat speaks. And the same old sting comes back again, the sting that came with the realization that everyone back at the manor seemed to collectively agree that they had betrayed them all somehow- that they chose Dori over all of them without even a second’s thought. And fuck… its a harder pill to swallow with Cat than it was Jet, even though it made sense given just how hostile Cat had acted towards them in the past when they faced each other before. 

They glance back up to Cat for a moment, before they answer her, curious to see if she seemed to have even an inclination what they were about to say before they do. Knowing Cat like they feel like they still do though, they figure she’d prefer them just to rip the band-aid off in one clean swoop than to try to get her to come to the conclusion herself. 

“The choice to leave was never my own,” they answer finally, after taking a long sigh. They know how much Cat looked up to White, but they also knew it was time she learned a little more about who the woman was that she called her leader. “She found out about Dori and I, and had me removed from the manor.” 

“Dori managed to get me into the Guardians shortly afterward.”

It’s not the answer she’s expecting to hear, though she isn’t sure what she is expecting. It’s... it’s a fucking shock. There’s no other way to describe the feeling when Banshee says it—that, after years of all of them thinking that Banshee had chosen to leave them all, because of Dearest, had picked the Guardians over them, that it had been White who had forced the choice, who had made them leave.

That the betrayal Catalyst has been stewing over for years wasn’t ever Banshee’s betrayal. It was White’s. 

     “What?” she says, but there isn’t any actual confusion in her voice, or disbelief. Because it isn’t the answer she was expecting, but she has no reason to doubt them, and she feels immediately and instinctively that it’s true. That maybe a part of her had known it, somewhere in the back of her mind, all along. 

She feels sick, for just a second, and then she feels furious. She has to take a step or two away, turns around, kicks the wall had with the toe of her boot. And she’s probably lucky she’s too exhausted from holding up Guardian fucking Tower to do anything more than that, because there are people in here who need the building they’re in to not blow up just because Catalyst is mad about something.